Community

From Emmy Award-winning directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Arrested Development) comes Community, a smart comedy series about higher education -- and lower expectations. The student body at Greendale Community College is made up of high-school losers, newly divorced housewives, and old people who want to keep their minds active. Within these not-so-hallowed halls, Community focuses on a band of misfits, at the center of which is a fast-talkin' lawyer whose degree has been revoked (Joel McHale), who form a study group and end up learning a lot more about themselves than they do about their course work.

Strategy? Community's got shit ratings, always has actually, and on any other network it probably would've been cancelled already. They get a decent 3 million each week, while The Big Bang Theory - in the same slot, on CBS - draws in a clean 15 million each week. I'm hoping it will draw a bigger crowd when it isn't duelling against the juggernaut that this piece of sh-... err, 'comedy series' is, but that's just the way it is.

As of which, those internet-petitions are worthless: more viewers equals a higher ad-revenue equals more money, which is the only thing that these TV-stations - rightfully so, it's a business after all - care about. So if you want to support Community, the only thing that might help as a non-American is to buy the DVD's, so that the series generaties a bigger income. They seriously couldn't/shouldn't care less that a bunch of people on the internet - of whom they don't receive a single euro - want to see it continued.

I particularly loved how the 2001 bit wasn't just a reference for reference's sake (which the Dr. Who stuff arguably was), but they took the style from it and used it to tell their own tale. And eventhough it was still distinguishably 2001, they didn't just copy the bedscene and the monolith, but filled it in with their own episode-plot which didn't feel forced at all. It just made everything fall organically into place. There is some seriously amazing writing going on on this show.